The Pennell Predicament
An Edenix Cycle Story
S. Rodger Bock
Copyright 2013 S. Roger Bock
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Acknowledgements
This one is for you, the reader. I hope you enjoy this and other works of fiction I’ve had the pleasure of writing.
One
The headline came as a complete shock to Jamison Pennell. He swore and sputtered a fraction of his inner thoughts aloud. He swatted at the three-dimensional words floating in front of him. They vanished for only a moment before popping right back up again with an annoying little chirping sound. They just were not going away. “Breaking News! Colonization ship crashes at the edge of the Expanse. All aboard presumed dead. Read the full story…”
Jamison was not interested in the full story. Undoubtedly, it would include no more facts than the ones he’d just read. Before the newsfeeds picked up the strings of data and began linking them together, he knew where they would lead. He knew more about the incident than they would for several hours, or at least several minutes. The cross-linking automated data sniffers were getting pretty quick these days. He grimaced and sucked air into his lungs. It would all lead back to him.
The realization terrified him—and if he were honest with himself, in an odd way it thrilled him a little too. For too long he’d been brushing a secret under the rug. Now, one way or another, that hidden truth would be coming out and he sensed the trickle of relief it would bring.
Not that he had anything to do with the wreck! The mere idea that an octuple-redundant failsafe ship like the one the colonists had used had come to a quick and violent end was preposterous. It just didn’t happen.
“But it did happen, Grandpa,” Amelia Pennell said from behind him.
He turned abruptly and scratched absently at the white mutton chop on the right side of his jaw. “How did you sneak in here again?” he asked. He looked past her and saw the door on the far side of the egg-shaped room was standing open.
The girl had long teal hair and a matching nose ring. It seemed to change colors with her mood, which most often meant it was amber or maroon, but at the moment it was the predominant color of the underbelly of the giant tortoise of Amandan IV. He’d walked under one once. The lumbering beast moved too slowly on its six legs to seem to mind that mere humans were walking around underneath it. They moved slowly enough for some people to take a picnic lunch. He’d not done anything nearly so foolish…more than a few times, anyway. The beasts moved more slowly than snails, but sometimes settled onto the ground to sleep even in the middle of night. One had to be careful to be close enough to the edge of the seventy-meter wide creature to reach safety before it eased down for a nap.
Regardless of the hue of the amazing creature’s relatively soft belly, Jamison found the jewelry silly on a pre-teen, even if she was about to complete her thirteenth year and become an actual teenager. Her hair changed colors too. She’d treated it with the same nanotech that was popular among the girls these days. Amelia’s mischievous eyes were teal as well—the same tech was embedded in the lenses she’d started wearing more for cosmetic affect than anything else. The whole thing made Jamison grimace. He thought it was too much. “Kids these days,” he mumbled to himself.
“The ship crashed. Why?” she asked him, probably hearing and ignoring his comment.
Jamison walked across the open room with teak wood flooring and an arched pure sky blue roof. He ambled past the black and brown speckled poppersquat leather sofa and navigated around the table of authentic oak from Earth. The horizontal surface was laden with discarded tech devices and mixed with bowls and trinkets from a few dozen human populated worlds on this side of the Expanse. He paused in front of the polished rock that rose from the floor and came up to his waist. The carved and polished stone served as his bar. He poured himself a drink in the iridescent ochre tinted crystal and matching carafe full of Tibbletonian rum. He remembered his first visit to that faraway world. It had been his vacation on Tibbleton in his youth that had resulted in his profession. “I was about your age,” he said without connecting the thought for Amelia, admiring the cut pattern on the crystal.
“When you first went to Tibbleton and decided that you could buy a SkipperRunner and make some quick cash. That single ship became a fleet of ships in just a few years. Grandpa, I have heard all your stories,” Amelia said. The girl came into view again now next to the extensive window that overlooked the vast canyon of lush jade and emerald vegetation and pocked with golden spires of volcanic origin several millennia old. The surrounding stratum had eroded over the ages to leave the fourteen spires scratching the sky. His own home was perched atop one of the shorter points midway between the green surface of the planet below and the dark purple star speckled sky above.
“Oh, I don’t think you’ve heard half of them,” he countered and grinned to himself momentarily allowing his mind to drift back to certain encounters she was too young to hear about. Just as the trysts had been short-lived, so was his distraction from the current predicament.
The rum had a sting, spice, and searing heat to it as it painted the inside of his throat. He didn’t drink often. “That’s your fifth drink, Grandpa,” she said, seeming to read his mind and disagree with him all at the same time.
“You are so annoying when you do that,” he told her, as his eyes narrowed in on her.
She might be becoming a young woman, but he couldn’t help but this think of her as the little five-year-old he loved to bounce on his knee and tickle on the floor. He loved those days, before she changed her appearance after only momentary whimsical thought. He’d liked her brown curly locks and her hazel eyes. In her natural colorings, she didn’t feel like an abandonment of his genetic donation on her mother’s side.
“Still no word, Grandpa.” Amelia’s gaze had shifted, and he supposed she was reading the dancing words on her own contacts. “SchoonerCorp built that one for us, didn’t they? But since you sold it to the colonization consortium, doesn’t it become their problem that it crashed?” she asked. “I know it’s a terrible tragedy, but I don’t see how it’s our problem.”
He frowned, sipping away and wondering if they had smoothed the stone his bar was made from with a hand tool like he’d been told when he bought it or rather just some automated directed energy polisher like everyone used. The original things meant more to him. Hand-crafted items were rare, and he’d used his company trips to distant worlds to pick up a thing or two along the way. He drew his finger along the cool slick surface.
“Yes,” he acknowledged Amelia at last. “But the families of the victims…”
“2,134 people,” she whispered over him.
“…will look to blame whoever they can. They will point to Schooner. They will point to us.” With the hand that was not clutching the crystal, he adjusted his silk cravat and brushed absently at his Anduzzlian tweed jacket.
“How could it be our fault?” she asked, as her hair, eyes, and nose ring eased into a shade that looked a lot like the kilometer-tall trees growing in the untamed wilderness on the other side of the world he lived on. The trees were ten times the tallest ones on Earth and the local botanists claimed the whole forest was really just a single organism. He thought he’d heard aspen trees on Earth were similar that way…but then well past 120 years old, he could have read it in some rare piece of fiction for all he
recalled. The shade didn’t look too good against her skin, but then the color choices were not meant to flatter as much as they were to jar his sensibilities.
Jamison ran his pink twitching tongue along the edge of the crystal goblet while he sniffed the rich intoxicating remains of the potent alcohol.
“There will be a lawsuit,” he predicted. “We might lose the company.”
He looked over at Amelia, whose chameleon colors were draining of saturation and turning to the tone of old bone.
Jamison Pennell poured the last of the liquor. “Then you do understand?” he asked. His head was now swimming in the sauce.
A tear oozed from her left duct. “We can’t let them take the company, Grandpa.”
Jamison looked out the window for a moment saying nothing and swirling the drink in his hand. He drew in the aroma of the rare expensive drink as thoughts coalesced in his mind. Turning to his granddaughter he felt a twinge of hope amidst the vast desert of despair.
“I’m glad you feel that way,” he said. “I need a favor.”
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